Beech River Books

Paul H. Carr has made it a life-long quest to yoke science and spirituality to meet the challenges of our time. He majored in physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studied the theology of culture under Paul Tillich at Harvard University, and earned his Ph.D. (physics) at Brandeis University. From 1967 to 1995, he led a group at the AF Research Laboratory on microwave ultrasonic surface acoustic waves (SAW) and superconductors. This contributed to the development of smaller and lower-cost components for radar, television and cell phones. The John Templeton Foundation awarded him a grant for the philosophy course “Science and Religion: Cosmos to Consciousness,” which he taught at the University of Massachusetts Lowell from 1998 to 2000.

Dr. Carr has published over eighty papers in refereed scientific journals, ZYGON: Journal of Religion and Science and in the book Religion in the New Millennium: Theology in the Spirit of Paul Tillich. He has been awarded ten patents for microwave devices. He has presented papers and organized workshops at professional meetings, universities, and churches in the United States and abroad. The John Templeton Foundation awarded him three science and religion grants. He has won prizes for his nature photography exhibits at the Manchester, New Hampshire Artists Association and the Marblehead, Massachusetts Artists Association.

Dr. Carr is a life fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, co-editor of the newsletter of the New England Section of the American Physical Society of which he is life-member, and President of the Hanscom Sigma Xi Chapter. He was a board member of the Faith and Science Exchange and the North American Paul Tillich Society. He is an active member of the Institute of Religion in an Age of Science, the American Scientific Affiliation, and the Thoreau Society.

In memory of his father, a Methodist minister, Paul has established the “Paul and Auburn Carr Scholarship in Science and Religion” at Boston University School of Theology, Reverend Auburn Carr's alma mater. Dr. Carr served as a deacon and teacher at the Congregational Church (UCC), Bedford, Massachusetts, where he and his wife Karin raised their five daughters. In 1986, Karin died of leukemia at age forty-six. In 2002, he moved to Bedford, New Hampshire to marry Virginia Kilpack and live next to a babbling brook. He is active in the adult education program of the Bedford, New Hampshire Presbyterian Church and a member of Presbyterian Association on Science, Technology, and Christian Faith.

 

Beauty in Science and Spirit (Beech River Books, 2006) is Paul Carr's celebration of the interplay between science, spirituality and individual experience. The chief feature of that interplay is the experience of beauty and the emotional and intellectual responses associated with it: wonder, satisfaction, an impulse towards further creativity, an intimation of something beyond the self. As a scientist, Dr. Carr draws a careful distinction between what is knowable in the physical sense, (things directly observable and measurable or effects of things that are observable and measurable) and what are essentially matters of faith. He maintains an optimism that science will continue to unravel mysteries about our physical world and provide a forum for international and inter-faith discussions of issues that currently divide us.

Beauty in Science and Spirit (Beech River Books, 2007) is now also available in a hardcover edition.